In keeping with her febrile nature, Levy’s prose is dynamic, molten with verbs and with images of light, movement and change. It’s no wonder that she falls in love with the story of the “breathtakingly butch” South African runner Caster Semenya, whose gender was brought under public scrutiny, because through Semenya she can ask: “What in the end is a woman?” When she travels, she feels both reckless and afraid, always on the lonely brink – and indeed there is a sense of brinkmanship in everything she does. She writes in order to make a narrative out of the chaos she creates, so that she is simultaneously in control and out of it. Fear hides in plain sight, masquerading as folly.

She talks to herself (this memoir is perhaps a conversation between her “competent” and her “bewildered” self in the very first sentence, when she addresses “you”, the reader, she is also addressing herself). She is endlessly trying on different selves: life is a movie, a novel, a carnival, a performance, a battleground her betrayal feeds her “smutty daydream” of being “gorgeous, treacherous, lascivious, damned”.

(In this phrase, and in Levy’s bold project of declassification, the ghost of Virginia Woolf is conjured up.)īut it is always possibility, not controversy, that Levy seeks. She has loved both men and women – the addictive, destructive affair that brought her world crashing down was with her ex-girlfriend, now transitioned to a man: irresistible to a woman wanting to “kick the door off its hinges”. She has taken risks, been greedy, carnal, ambitious (“it was unseemly how successful I felt”), intoxicated by desires (“the sparkle of one’s ego, pumped full of bubbles by another’s ardour”). Her life has been adventurous and, to some, controversial. Feminism offered women “the lavish gift of agency” and Levy grabbed it. Levy has specialised in stories about “women who are too much”. The woman who exhilaratingly thought she could have everything finds herself with nothing. Then she lost her baby, her spouse, her home, and she fell into the desolation she had held at bay, which had held her at bay. She believed she could be free and in perpetual motion. She believed nothing bad could happen to her in the “movie of her life”, because she was its scriptwriter and protagonist. From the time she was a clever, vigilant girl growing up in “clean, leafy” Westchester, New York, she had believed that normal rules did not apply to her, until she found that, after all, of course, they did: grief comes to us all. Levy is a fearless, original journalist, now on the New Yorker, and she uses these same qualities to scrutinise her own life, reporting its formation and unravelling.

The rules do not apply by ariel levy